David Harlow Keynotes on Health Care Social Media and the Law at Annual Healthcare and the Internet Conference

November 19, 2010

I attended the 14th Annual Healthcare and the Internet Conference in Las Vegas this week, and gave a keynote presentation entitled: “Health Care Social Media – The Lawyers Don’t Always Say No” in which I discussed the reasons for health care providers to engage with their constituencies via social media — both from a business perspective and from a regulatory perspective (ACO rules and future phases of Meaningful Use rules effectively demand a response from providers involving social media), and how to do it without getting into trouble (there are a variety of HIPAA, other privacy, liability, anti-kickback and fraud and abuse issues to keep in mind when planning for patient engagement through social media). Here are the slides from my talk:

Some of the themes I touched upon ran through other sessions at the conference as well: development of patient portals, on-line services and a panoply of off-the-shelf and customized web and social media solutions. There was a great deal of sharing — formal and informal — throughout, and I enjoyed meeting many folks in person (some of whom I’ve known for a while, but only on line). Kudos to the team at Greystone for putting on a terrific conference.

I want to hear the detail, too. This is crucial for the health IT folks to get on board with. The biggest obstacles I am dealing with right now are the roadblocks I encoutner around web tracking tools like Omniture. The analytics folks must solve this problem or there is no way we can continue to show the value of how health information is used by consumers.